A Week of Missed Opportunities....Weekend Cooking

As I sit down to write my weekly Weekend Cooking post, I find myself without a subject! No new food related book read this week. No movies watched. A number of excellent food related opportunities missed, any one of which would have made a nice post.

On Friday, my niece and my sister in law and I went to The Melting Pot for dinner, the first time I had been to a fondue restaurant. Perhaps the first time I had fondue, which is hard to believe since I grew up in the midst of the great fondue popularity of the 60's and 70's. It was all great fun and very tasty, first the cheese course, then an array of meats and veggies to be cooked in a tasty broth and then dessert. Oh, the dessert...the Flaming Turtle, Milk chocolate, caramel and chopped pecans, flambéed tableside, with strawberries, pieces of pound cake, marshmallows and such to dip into it's melted, bubbling, chocolate goodness. Perhaps one of the loveliest desserts I ever had. But no picture taken...

Then, the niece and I went to Philadelphia Thursday and Friday for the Flower Show and even though we live only about an hour or so away, we stayed overnight and feasted on Asian cuisine at a couple of restaurants. For lunch, it was dim sum at the unassuming Dim Sum Garden. A variety of dumplings, including something called soup dumplings, steamed buns, a nice cold cucumber salad with cilantro, spring rolls...and the most tasty scallion pancakes. Wonderful with a dash of the vaguely named 'dumpling sauce'. Again, sadly, no pictures taken, so I borrowed these from the net. Then, after a return to the flower show and a stop at the International Wine and Spirit Festival in the adjoining Great Hall, to sample a few too many of the maybe 100 offerings (we are not going to discuss how I forgot my "water only beverage for Lent" pledge when faced with all that free booze. Really, I forgot), we went to dinner at a Malaysian restaurant, The Banana Leaf, where the niece had what she proclaims is the best pad thai in the world.
Again...I took no photographs at either and 'borrowed' one of these tasty, crispy, savory pancakes. Yum.

So, what of the flower show? Was there no food related matter? Well, the convention center is lined with food vendors, selling various food vendor foods. Hardly worthy of a post. But there was one thing, in one of the Major Exhibitor creations, that was food related. It was a display named something like Across America and so, of course, it started in Maine and portrayed one of my favorite foods...

See it there, on the right?

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All we need is some nice melted butter... ;-)

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This is my contribution this to this week's Weekend Cooking.
"Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend."
Be sure to check out the other entries this week. As always, hosted by Beth Fish Reads.

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